TO JUDGE BY the reports in the wine media, things soon began to go Rodenstock’s way. In December, Rodenstock received Bonani’s report at his address in Monaco. Bonani had used accelerator mass spectrometry, the same technology used by the University of Toronto as part of the GSF tests. Writing from Zurich on December 7, 1992, Bonani reported that his radiocarbon dating pegged the wine around 1830, with a thirty-five-year margin of error. This meant that the wine’s vintage could fall anywhere between 1795 and 1865. The cork’s date range, meanwhile, was between 1825 and 1895. Bonani wrote that “the radiocarbon tests carried out on the 1787 Lafite show no mixing of wine younger than 1962. The reported age of the wine and its cork fall within the confidence limits.” Hall, according to Broadbent, obtained a similar result. The Oxford lab would later report that it could not find the results, a highly unusual event, according to its deputy director.
In actuality, Rodenstock had not proved his case. Although old, both wine and cork had been shown to be younger than 1787. Moreover, the 1985 lab result purporting to show that the cork in the 1787 Yquem was “original” had analyzed its chemical composition but proven nothing about the age of the wine or the cork. To the contrary, Heinz Eschnauer, a German chemist to whom Rodenstock had sent part of the cork, specifically rejected Rodenstock’s contention that it was possible to confirm the wine’s age based on the tests he performed. This was the same scientist who, according to a note by Broadbent in a 1986 auction catalog, had “rigorously examined” the 1784 Yquem Christie’s ended up selling to Iyad Shiblaq/Dodi Al-Fayed. Most damningly, on December 14, 1992, the Munich court found that in the case of the Frericks bottle tested earlier, Rodenstock “adulterated the wine or knowingly offered adulterated wine.”
Remarkably, the explicit finding of guilt went unnoted in the wine media, the science of the 1985 tests went unanalyzed, and Rodenstock and Broadbent reveled in their test result, glossing over the fact that it wasn’t actually exculpatory. On December 15, 1992, writing from Monte Carlo, Rodenstock told Rarities co-editor Dennis Foley, who was sympathetic to the German, that the recent test had vindicated him: There was no post-1962 wine in the bottle that had just been carbon dated; moreover, “the wine couldn’t be younger than 1795 on average.” Rodenstock raised questions about GSF’s impartiality—why had it taken a year to do the test and announce the results?—and suggested again that Frericks must have manipulated the bottle provided to GSF.
The New Year came and went. On January 7, 1993, Broadbent eagerly wrote to Kip Forbes to reassure him. “Dear Kit,” his letter began, inauspiciously. “First of all, thank you for the charming family Christmas card. Always beautifully done.” Broadbent went on to say that the Zurich bottle had passed “with flying colors” and that “there is no reason to doubt that any of the Jefferson bottles which emanated directly from Hardy Rodenstock’s cellar have been tampered with.”
He also asserted that Cinder Stanton’s allegation that Jefferson never had his bottles engraved had been “disproved,” citing a September 17, 1789, letter from Jefferson to John Jay that Broadbent had discovered after the original furor in 1985. (Broadbent had since amassed a substantial Jefferson library.) In a postscript regarding a shipment of wine to George Washington, Jefferson had written, “Every bottle is marked (with a diamond) with the initial letter of the wine it contains.” Though the evidence related only to a single shipment of wine—a shipment to Washington rather than to himself, which included no red Bordeaux and only the generically described “Sauternes”—and mentioned only a one-initial engraving, Broadbent claimed vindication. One month later, in a letter to Margaret Kelly, the Forbes Galleries curator at the time of the original auction, Broadbent was more pointed. “The researchers at Monticello said that there was simply no evidence of Jefferson giving instructions for bottles to be identified by engraving,” Broadbent wrote. “How wrong they are.”
That spring, a lawyer for another owner of some Jefferson bottles, Bill Koch, expressed concern about the Frericks dispute. Koch’s office hired a Munich lawyer, Jack Schiffer, to look into it. Schiffer was satisfied by the evidence of the Bonani test, and Koch didn’t pursue the matter further.
On January 21, Rodenstock gloated to Foley, who was preparing a big article on the whole affair for Rarities, that the minister of research who had oversight of GSF, Hans Riesenhuber, had been fired two days earlier. Rodenstock suggested that the ouster was due to mistakes related to the Frericks test, including not charging Frericks for its cost. The following month, on February 15, Rodenstock wrote to Foley again. In this letter, Rodenstock set down a few further thoughts about Pétrus large-format bottles, the Jefferson-Yquem connection, and the recent Bonani/Hall tests, and he enclosed copies of friendly letters to him from Frericks sent as recently as the late 1980s. Only “jealousy and envy,” Rodenstock said, could have motivated Frericks to come forward with doubts years later. On February 23, Michael Broadbent wrote to Foley, including the 1789 Jefferson letter to John Jay mentioning diamond engraving, and concluded, “Let’s hope the whole subject can now be dropped.”
Rodenstock and Frericks tentatively agreed to a settlement in which they would stop denouncing one another and drop their respective legal claims, but Rodenstock couldn’t help himself. “Churchill always said that it is important who wins the last battle,” Rodenstock crowed. “As the experts have accepted, the wine can only be authentic. This has been proved by the exact and encompassing examinations in Oxford and Zurich. Whoever it was who poured new wine in the other bottle in an attempt to harm me, thank God he didn’t succeed.”
When Foley’s Rarities article came out, it included an entirely personal tangent about Frericks, describing him as a drunk and, quoting a German newspaper, “a flathead.” Frericks and Rodenstock wouldn’t reach a final settlement until 1995.
IN SPITE OF the scandal, Rodenstock claimed that his business had grown substantially from 1991 to 1992, and he continued to make the international wine scene. He was now often accompanied by Helga Lehner, a blond Munich actress he had married in 1991. In early 1994, Rodenstock and Georg Riedel hosted a blind tasting of French versus Napa wines, attended by twenty-four journalists, including Hugh Johnson, dean of English wine writers. The following year, in November, Rodenstock attended a lavish tasting in Ohio hosted by an ob-gyn who stored his 18,000-bottle collection in an underground bank vault he had bought and repurposed. And Rodenstock received two important new endorsements which suggested that the luster of his name had been at least partially restored by the tests in Zurich and at Oxford.
The first came from the Rothschilds, the first family of Bordeaux, whose name graced two of the five first growths. In 1994 the family acquired one of the Jefferson bottles to display at Waddesdon Manor, ancestral seat of an Anglo-Austrian branch of the dynasty and now a part-time tourist site overseen by Lord Jacob Rothschild and owned by England’s National Trust. The Waddesdon Wine Cellars were opening, and Michael Broadbent, who had kept the empty pint-sized bottle from the Bonani test at Christie’s on King Street, presented it to Lord Rothschild at London’s Spencer House on February 15. (Château Lafite itself donated a magnum of 1870, and Philippine de Rothschild, when she saw it, made a one-upping gift of 1868 Mouton.) The following week, Lord Rothschild sent a thank-you note to Rodenstock. The bottle took its place in a Lucite case in the cellar. A few years later, at the invitation of Lord Rothschild, Rodenstock and his wife would attend a lunch thrown at Waddesdon by Gordon Getty.
In 1995, Rodenstock executed his greatest public-relations coup yet, drawing Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker to his annual tasting. Johnson normally avoided such events (two years earlier, he had written witheringly about “the awe-inspiring vulgarity of some of America’s wine spectaculars”). Parker, though, was the real catch. He had, by this time, achieved an importance in the wine world unmatched by critics in other fields. It was hard for a retailer to sell a wine Parker didn’t like, and hard not to sell one he had praised. Though Parker was controversial—for his p
ower over the market, for the largely European perception that he favored “obvious,” overconcentrated wines, for the silly precision of his 100-point scoring system—he was widely respected for his independence, integrity, and indifference to Bordeaux’s traditional hierarchy. He had launched his newsletter, The Wine Advocate, with Ralph Nader as his model, did not accept advertising, and, unlike many other wine writers, eschewed junkets and gift bottles.
Parker had some experience with old-wine collectors. It had been Bipin Desai who arranged for him to first taste Margaux 1900, which Parker then awarded 100 points in The Wine Advocate. But for the most part, Parker steered clear of mega-tastings, and he had declined several invitations to previous Rodenstock events. Eventually the two men were brought together by Daniel Oliveros and Jeff Sokolin, the Russian-born cousin of Bill Sokolin, for whom both men had worked before launching their own rarities business, Royal Wine Merchants. Among colleagues, Oliveros and Sokolin were known as “the sexy boys,” because they seemed to have an exclusive line on “sexy juice”—old bottles in large formats that nobody else offered. They were close to Parker, and they were believed to serve as Rodenstock’s distributors in America.
At some events in 1994 and 1995, Parker met Rodenstock and found, as he would later tell his newsletter subscribers, that “the unkind remarks I had read about him were untrue. A man of extraordinary charm and graciousness, Rodenstock is a true wine lover in the greatest sense of the word, as well as exceptionally knowledgeable, and generous to a fault (he charges nothing for the opportunity to participate in his tastings). His passion for wine history, and of course, the world’s greatest wines, is irrefutable.” Parker went on to say he had been persuaded to attend Rodenstock’s annual tasting in 1995 by three things: Rodenstock’s conviction that Pomerol had been given short shrift by the wine media, his “obsession with finding extraordinarily old bottles of Pomerol from private cellars in Europe,” and his sheer “passion and enthusiasm.”
At the tasting, held at the Königshof Hotel in Munich, Rodenstock included a vertical showcasing l’Eglise Clinet, a relatively unknown Pomerol estate. Parker tasted many older vintages of the wine for the first time, and later gave them top scores. At the same event, Rodenstock pulled out all the stops with a 10:00 a.m. “pre-Phylloxera breakfast,” at which he served sixteen pre-phylloxera wines blind, including both an 1874 Ausone and an 1847 Rausan-Segla. Parker was the guest of honor. He called the 1811 and 1847 Yquems “the greatest Yquems I have tasted.” The 1811 was “liquefied crême brûlée” the 1847 “would have received more than 100 points if possible.” A photograph captured him and Rodenstock huddled together, talking about the wines. On his flight home to Baltimore, by way of London, Parker “set a personal record for mineral water consumption,” he wrote in his newsletter.
“Not only was the weekend the most extraordinary three days of wine tasting, superb eating, and wine camaraderie that I have ever experienced, but it stands as the wine event of my lifetime,” Parker wrote. If he had any doubts about the authenticity of the bottles, they were laid to rest by the presence of Broadbent. “The condition of the bottles was extraordinary,” Parker wrote. “No other than Michael Broadbent authenticated the age of the bottles.” In the next edition of Parker’s massive Bordeaux, his reference guide to the world’s greatest wine region, the critic thanked Rodenstock and included several tasting notes from the 1995 tasting.
As the most powerful person in the wine world, someone depended on by rich neophytes unsure of their palates, Parker had just given Hardy Rodenstock an exceedingly valuable public seal of approval. Rodenstock began boasting that, before the tasting, he had bought up all the old l’Eglise Clinet on the market, confident that Parker would award high scores and send the wine’s price soaring.
CHAPTER 15
“AWASH IN FAKES”
IN 1996 A SECRET CONCLAVE OF FIFTEEN LEADING players in the rare-wine market met in a boardroom at the Intercontinental Hotel in London. Merchants and auctioneers who normally competed with each other, they included Serena Sutcliffe from Sotheby’s, a representative from Christie’s, Stephen Browett from Farr Vintners, and Tim Littler, the Whitwhams merchant whose Jefferson bottle had been broken by Bill Sokolin. Sotheby’s insisted that everyone sign confidentiality agreements. The topic of discussion was wine piracy.
In the last three years, fine-wine prices had exploded. In late 1993, New York State legalized wine auctions, and in 1995 and 1996, auction totals in the United States surpassed those in the UK. In 1996, worldwide wine auction sales exceeded $70 million, more than twice the amount in 1994. A lot more wine was being sold, and the center of the auction market had shifted from its historical base in England to the United States.
The profits to be made from selling trophy wines, and the relative ease of forging them, had yielded a flood of bogus bottles on the market. Invariably they were the wines with the most shocking price tags—cult labels, in cult vintages. Pétrus ’61. Romanée-Conti ’90. Mouton-Rothschild ’45. Cheval Blanc ’47. Le Pin ’82. Often they were in magnums.
The prices for these rarities had seemed to soar in the 1980s, but in the 1990s they rose vertically. In 1996 a case of six magnums of ’82 Le Pin fetched $47,740 at Sotheby’s, while a case of ’45 Mouton brought in $112,500 at Zachys-Christie’s in New York. With the exception of Mouton, Cheval Blanc, and a few others, these wines had tiny productions—Pétrus, rarely more than 3,500 cases a year; Le Pin, six hundred cases on average—and their rarity only added to their cachet and market value. Yet Pétrus ’82 was raining from the sky. Merchants who never used to see ’45, ’47, or ’61 Pétrus in magnum were now being offered it every week. Littler and a few others believed the trade needed to take action.
The London summit began ambitiously. A letter was drafted, with the idea of collectively sending it to the major French châteaux and negociants asking for more-stringent anti-piracy measures: short capsules, so corks could be read; embedded codes in the labels; vintages embossed in the bottle glass. Someone from Farr, which, despite having become a well-respected player, hadn’t entirely escaped its upstart reputation, mentioned the name of a Burgundy broker based in Paris: he was a major source of theirs, and they’d been encountering problems with a lot of the DRC they received from him. It was speculated that Rodenstock might get some of his wine from the broker. Farr said they’d stop using the man if everyone else would.
But self-interest and apathy conspired to kill the whole initiative. Half the room wouldn’t agree to stop using the dubious source of rare Burgundy. As for the letter, a British broker predicted glumly that the French would say, “That’s why you shouldn’t buy from foreign negociants, only straight from the châteaux.” The letter was never sent. The meeting went nowhere. Given the confidentiality agreements, it also went unreported at the time.
“Serena told me Sotheby’s couldn’t be seen as in association with Farr Vintners,” one participant recalled, claiming that her behavior then quickly changed. “Suddenly, Serena disapproved. Two weeks later, she gave an interview to the Times about the counterfeiting problem.” The merchant laughed bitterly. “Sotheby’s does no checks at all.”
IN WINE CIRCLES, talking openly about fraudulent wine remained virtually taboo, and Christie’s and Sotheby’s continued to disagree about the scope of the problem. Sutcliffe was singularly outspoken about its seriousness, and given to pronouncements regarding provenance, like, “If the trail goes dead, you have to drop the transaction.” Two years later she would tell Wine Spectator that the market was “awash in fakes.” Christie’s Broadbent and Paul Bowker, along with Rodenstock, were dismissive, minimizing the problem as exaggerated.
Yet it was clearly expanding. Only a year after raving about the Rodenstock tasting, Robert Parker published an essay titled “In Vino Veritas?” The article focused on “the growing evidence of phony bottles” in “the gray market,” meaning distribution channels outside of authorized supply chains. “[R]are wine may be the only luxury-priced co
mmodity in the world that does not come with a guarantee of authenticity,” Parker wrote. “The appearance of dishonest segments of society with only one objective, to take full advantage of the enormous opportunity that exists to make a quick buck by selling bogus wines, is not that shocking. This has always been a problem, but based on the number of letters and telephone calls I have received from victims who have been the recipients of suspiciously-labeled wines, with even more unusual contents, it is a subject that needs to be addressed.”
Parker himself had seen numerous fakes, but added that all of his own experiences dealing with the gray market had been on the up-and-up. When he republished the essay in the next edition of his big book, he added a few sentences reporting that Pétrus owner Christian Moueix said that old vintages of Pétrus in big bottles, especially, should be considered suspect. Soon his fax machine was buzzing with indignant letters from Rodenstock.
REPORTS OF FAKERY, since the episode with the fabricated Warhol Mouton labels, had been sporadic prior to the early 1990s. When there were incidents, they often involved the 1982 vintage, which had drawn speculators and seen price increases unlike any other modern vintage. Near the end of 1985, French police arrested several people in the right-bank city of Libourne and seized some seventy cases of regional plonk masquerading as 1981 and 1982 Pétrus. In 1990, five cases of 1986 DRC Montrachet, sold by the Wine Merchant of Beverly Hills to a Japanese collector, turned out to be cheap Pouilly-Fumé, gussied up with fake labels.
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